Research: eco-evolutionary feedbacks in dispersal

What ecological factors drive the evolution of dispersal, and how does dispersal behavior feed back to influence these ecological factors?

Individual dispersal is driven in part by the spatial distribution of resources and of other individuals. Yet as individuals disperse, they alter these distributions, and therefore the selective pressures on their own dispersal (an eco-evolutionary feedback loop).

We show that the relative timing of dispersal and mating influences the evolution of sex differences in dispersal (Shaw & Kokko 2014), and that both mating timing and sex differences influence a population's spread rate (Shaw & Kokko 2015). We find that allowing dispersal to adapt as a population spreads alters individual dispersal strategies, which in turn can either speed up or slow down the rate of population spread. Intriguingly, even though individuals face a mate-finding Allee effect (difficulty finding mates at the low density edge of the population), they often evolve movement rules that make it even harder to find mates (Shaw & Kokko 2015). This indicates that mating failures are not always associated with slower invasions.